How to Design a Balanced Game

A critical component of games design, specifically in multiplayer games is balance. This essentially is a term used to describe when a game is fair for everyone involved, and all the players in the game have the same chance of both succeeding and losing. A well balanced game means that there is lots of variety to be had, and there isn't one main method or strategy to succeed with every other gameplay element being made completely redundant. This also counts against both other players and AI enemies, and a singleplayer game being really easy that you can storm through can be considered imbalanced. A quote to sum up balance would be: "Gameplay is all about making choices and in a poorly-balanced game, many of the choices available to the player are essentially rendered useless. And this, in a nutshell, is why game balance is so important -- it preserves your game elements from irrelevance. In an imbalanced game, one or more "dominant strategies" quickly emerge, limiting other strategies useless except for some un-intended purpose (such as getting used as a handicap mechanism, or comedic reasons)."(Burgun, 2016).

There are three main types of game balance depending on the circumstance: player to player balance, player to gameplay balance and gameplay to gameplay balance. These balances essentially form depending on how those two elements interact with each other. Player to player is mostly in a multiplayer scenario, as different people compete to win the game. Depending on how developers vision their game, they can give experienced players a much higher chance of success, or keep a level playing field no matter what time investment players have. Next is player to gameplay, which focuses predominately in single player games as the user aims to overcome the already programmed game that they purchased. This could include the fact that a game shouldn't be too hard, and there should always be a way to succeed (such as choosing an 'easy' difficulty mode), or else a player may feel cheated out of their money if there's no way they can even finish the game they paid for, since if a game's completely brutal with its challenge with a poor flow channel (researched in an earlier blog post), the player will be too frustrated and will then just give up with the game entirely. Lastly is gameplay to gameplay balance, which revolves around how the game's base mechanics cooperate with each other, and aren't strictly to do with the player's manual input. For example, there could be a specific part of a game which can only be solved through the use of a single item. But if that said item is very well hidden and a player isn't guaranteed to even find it in a normal playthrough, this creates an incredible sense of inbalance as the player must then backtrack to every single area of the game, searching every nook and cranny for a hidden secret. This is a bad form of game design and the player shouldn't be punished for not playing the game in the exact way the developers intended, leave hidden and devious secrets to more optional content like cosmetics. All of these three types will be expanded in more detail inside the examples below, but first I will talk about luck in games.

When luck gets introduced into a game in the form of RNG (random number generator), this is where things in a game can start to get unbalanced, as many skill-based games try to minimise luck and fortune as much as possible over skills. Hardcore players usually feel cheated out of a victory when an opponent won and bested them purely by chance, and it's understandable why, it's a major factor in a game compared to the gameplay and base mechanics that the players do not have direct control over, and thus couldn't have influenced the game anymore than they did and changed their odds of winning the game. Luck still can be used competitively however, to make a game balanced in a different way though with a risk versus reward factor.

So for example: in competitive Pokemon battling tournaments where players take turns using attacks against each other, every move in the game has a certain percentage chance of hitting, however, stronger moves tend to have less accuracy than weaker moves. This is an incredibly clever system that has players weighing up their options and manipulating their odds even by a small amount. Should they use a very strong attack that does 120 damage but only has a 70% chance of hitting? Or go a safer route and use an attack which does 80 damage but with a 95% chance of success? This really does help the game feel balanced, and when the odds are really against you it doesn't feel as unfair as other multiplayer games, since there was something else you could have done to give you a better chance of success (in this case, by using a different attack).

There really is a time and a place for even heavy amounts of chance in games, as heavily discussed by (Grant, 2014), and this luck in place does tend to work better in more solo-orientated games which revolve around that concept and especially casual games designed for families, like Mario Party in this instance. In Mario Party many of the minigames and board games you play rely heavily on luck and chance (like rolling a dice or just hoping for the best), but this is actually more of a design choice than a mistake since it gives everyone a more equal chance to win when playing with a bigger variety of people. It means even an adult who's never played a video game before, or a small child, still have just as a big of a chance to win as a more skilled Mario Party enthusiast. So through this even games with high amounts of luck still have a time and place in games.

Mario Party, a chance-based game that's designed to be accessible to a huge target audience (Levy, 2015)

As explained in this Extra Credits video (linked below), game balance doesn't always have to be perfect, and instead a game (especially a single-player experience) that isn't can still work. As the player plays through an RPG for example, when they 'level up' their stats increase, which means that the developers must also gradually increase the difficulty of the enemy stats too, so that it scales with the player's progression meaning no enemy in the game is ever too strong to fight, but aren't exactly a pushover either. If an RPG is designed to be tough though the game can contain elements imbalance, and the RPG series Fire Emblem for example utilises this incredibly well. Whenever a character runs out of health and dies in that game, they're dead for good, and any contribution to the story they give from that point on gets completely cut as other characters mourn over their loss. This makes you really care about the characters as you play, and because there are so many tough enemies on the battlefield at once, it really forces the player to think and strategise every move they make (should their send out one of their strongest healers to one point of the map, and risk them getting surrounded by enemies). This game series proves that in one regard, having a tough and unbalanced game can actually enhance the player's enjoyment as they plan a route to get everyone through the game unscathed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w

There are a multitude of other different aspects in games that the developers must think of when 'balancing' it, right down to map layouts and different weapons in shooter games. For example, if there is a certain map in a game with too many open areas and not much cover to seek refuge from, there may not be many places for close-range melee classes to hide from the untouchable snipers. Likewise weapons in shooter games must be kept in sync and not have one weapon so good it renders another completely worthless, because the first gun is better in every way. Variety is the spice of life and having as many players with their own unique playstyles is healthy for the community as a whole.

A situation happened in the online shooter game Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, where a new fan-made character, the Berry Shooter (pictured below), was officially released into the game and given to everyone instantly for free. But this character was incredibly overpowered, as it had a very fast rate of fire, did a high amount of attack power and it included a very large amount of splash damage around the area where their bullets landed. This meant that many players could use this new character instantly when theys tarted the game, and just shoot in the general direction of their enemies, while still hurting them tremendously due to it having such a large area of effect. For a few weeks this pretty much broke the online component of the game, as most players online were single-handedly using this one character and no other could counter it efficiently, and until the developers issued a patch which heavily nerfed it, this became a very frustrating experience for anybody who didn't want to use that one character. This is a good example of imbalance in a game, and how it can have catastrophic consequences, especially in an online multiplayer environment, when not properly balanced and playtested.

The Berry Shooter, an imbalanced menace, which is also a prime example of a character that caused an online shooter's entire ecosystem to be completely disrupted for a few weeks, simply due to being too versatile, fast and strong. (Metz, 2014)